All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find out what the day ends in
Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS. Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

backup system over ssh, exlucde common dirs

Have a smile
Outputs utf-8 smileys

Limit bandwidth usage by apt-get
Limits the usage of bandwidth by apt-get, in the example the command will use 30Kb/s ;) It should work for most apt-get actions (install, update, upgrade, dist-upgrade, etc.)

Find your graphics chipset
Displays only the VGA adapter/chipset being used for the graphics. In this case, it gave me the "M22" and "Mobility Radeon x300" that I needed to research a graphics issue I was having.

Download Video & extract only a specific Time of it
Because this does not download more of the video than necessary, it is faster (especially with long videos).

Get just the IP for a hostname

Recursively remove .svn directories from a local repository

connect via ssh using mac address
Connect to a machine running ssh using mac address by using the "arp" command


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: